Annette Sisson
Tennessee Intersections, Autumn
Squat black tobacco barn,
slats lined in light. White
block letters—Best Restroom
on I–65, Only Two Miles.
Sunlight amplifies bluff—
an aria of tones, gold to red,
like descants trilling above
bass lines of gray–green pine.
At the junction, soaring shelves
of bare stone, a metal sign,
black capitals on a field
of red: Abortion Is Murder.
Gas pumps leer
from the highway’s other side.
A terrier’s black leather nose
bumps pontoon breeze. Kingfishers
fire streams of chuffs, rattle
brittle leaves. A heron drifts
above shallows, schools of fish
slapping silver circles.
A girl’s tee–shirt traced
with gray snails announces
There’s No Rush. A garden
in red–green–yellow–purple ink
curls up her left forearm.
Beside dry creek, a ten-foot
sycamore trunk, almost bare,
slight swerve at the waist,
two smooth arms reckoning
with sky. A modernist sculpture—
Woman pleads for rainfall.
Annette Sisson’s poems appear in Penn Review, Birmingham Poetry Review, Rust & Moth, and other journals and anthologies. Her second book, Winter Sharp with Apples, was published by Terrapin Books in 2024. Her first book, Small Fish in High Branches, was published by Glass Lyre Press in 2022. In 2024 she was a finalist for the Charles Simic Poetry Prize, and two poems were nominated for The Pushcart; in 2025 her poems have been named finalists in River Heron Review’s and Passager Magazine’s poetry prizes.